Right, welcome back to Pro Photo Insights, today I’m, I’m into the fields. Can you believe that, I seem to be each week in fields at the moment, so I apologize, that will change, honest. I’m gonna show you today some, the set up of the camera for shooting panoramic successfully. And I know we did touch on this, I think in episode three, which is called the Cape. And I show you how to do the stitching of the images together in photoshop and I think we also used photomatics additional exposure blend in, but at the time, I didn’t do any location video simply because the camera, the video camera, I was using it then, was faulty, and it was appalling. And in the forum, we’ve been having some discussions about various subjects and someone mentioned about panoramic film cameras and I said well you know, honestly, you can do it digitally. And it occurred to me that I actually hasn’t perhaps gone over the settings for the actual shooting of the panoramic. So, that’s why I come out today to perhaps, just show you a few tricks that will help you align those images up and get some really good stitching going. So, to Mike B. from Essex, this is for you mate. Okay, so the first thing I’m gonna show you is this little plastic gizmo, I just give a little close up in camera. Now this is almost just a spirit level and you can just slide in top of your hot shot on your camera and I shall now demonstrate, like so. And this is handy, it’s only a few pounds, 6 dollars, that’s what I’ll gonna call it, and it just slides there on the top there. And helps you just make sure that your horizons are level. Whether you’re doing panoramic or not, I find this is a real help especially if you’re doing any kind of interior photography with wide angled lenses, coz it can drive me crazy sometimes wondering if everything is level, so. This will save you a little bit of frustration and it’s great for the panoramic. You don’t have to shoot panoramic with the spirit level, you can actually does this shoot panoramic for the tripod, you can handheld them, and this stitching software these days is very good. But, it’s gonna help you I think to use a tripod and get your composition right. The first thing I’m gonna tell you is that, you probably got this wonderful brand new digital SLR camera, with auto everything. For this sort of thing, you wanna switch all the auto functions off. For starters, most important, turn your autofocus on the, on the lens, it’s got to be switched to manual focus. And also exposure, I would recommend the aperture must not change for any of the shots. So if you shoot at F16, you keep it at F16 both the images. You can change the shutter speed, that’s not a problem, so if you’ve got one scene here, and you obviously you move across, and you got another scene, but with the sun in shot, you gonna have to increase the exposure, otherwise you’re gonna get, it’s be going silhouette and too dark. But you can do that, you can use the, you can use the shutter speed. So I recommend use it in manual. Color balance I’d leave it on daylight, that’s the best thing. That it pretty much it. The other thing I need to just tell you is the, once you’ve got your composition worked out, I’m shooting this one in a panoramic format, but that means you can, I just got to put my microphone down quite a bit. You can shoot with the camera vertical and pan around, like so. And some people do that. I actually never done it like that, to be honest with you, and not for this type of thing. I’ve done it for HDR downs when I’m doing my CGI car stuff. And that’s completely different cattlefish. But for panoramic I tend to shoot them this way. But you can shoot some in the vertical mode if you want to. So first things first is get your, get your camera level as possible for the first exposure, and you basically sort out your exposure and everything, shoot your picture, and then what you want to do is then rotate the camera around but not too far. You wanna leave, probably about 15-20 percent overlap. And that will help you when you’re stitching the, stitching the picture, that help the software get a good stitch, so we won't leave a gap. What I’ll do in a minute after I pan the video around and show you what I mean, if I can do it. But if not, we’ll do it on the screen cast. So you need to pan your camera around, again, if the, if the camera’s not quite level don’t sweat it too much. But you know, if you can just gently just you know, level it out again for your second frame, but say, it’s a bit off, don’t worry. Focal length wise, you can go wide but it make things a bit more difficult, you get a bit more distortion towards the end of the frame normally on wide angled lenses. So I’d recommend, again, I wouldn’t go, I tend to go much wider than 35, there’s not much need to, coz obviously you’re doing panoramic, it’s quite wide anyway. So it will get a better result between perhaps 35 and 70. Or, but you can try wide angle but I just don’t, don’t tend not to stitches well I find. But apart from that, do what you want, you know, just give it a try and have a play around. And what we’ll do in a second, I’ll take you through the overlap a little bit, just to give you a better idea what I mean, and then we’ll go on from there in the post production. We just perhaps do a quick stitch on one of the images. Welcome back, now back in from the cold. I got in front of me several different panoramic that I’ve shot and the one we’re gonna use to give you a demo is this one I shot in Prague. I was there all a while ago, basically for a couple of days, I was shooting a 360 hasty I’ve done for the car photography and so I was on the Charles Bridge at dawn, these images. And I also shot some nice panoramics there, which is why I thought a bit more exotic than showing a panoramic from some old fields somewhere, you don’t know where. So, here’s the images on the screen, actually these are the raw files, I already process them and I put them as TIF’s and I’m gonna go very brief, we’ve already gone through this stitching process in the previous video. But I just wanted you to just give you a bit of demonstration again on a couple of things. So I’m just gonna pull up this image to show the overlap, I can't really do it in the video camera as good as I want it. So here’s our images at each frame, this is obviously the left hand frame, this one’s the right hand frame. And as you can see, I’ve left quite a bit of overlap there in the shot. This is what I’m talking about, if you’re allowing for an overlap, you’re giving the stitching software as much to play with as possible, you know, if you only overlap a little bit on the edge you’ve got less, less chance of a good stitch. So you’re always need to allow, let’s say about 15-20 percent overlay just to make sure you got enough for this software have a play with, so. I think that’s a little bit more of a better demonstration more than to the video camera, so. There we go, so, always allow plenty of overlap in your images when doing this. So let’s just get rid of that, so what I’m gonna do now is just highlight these two images, these two TIF files. You can use the DNG files if you want to, in fact we can go ahead and just do that as a demo. And go up to your menu at the top here, go to Tools, Photoshop, and Photomerge. And that will open the Photomerge, as I mentioned before, I tend to just leave this on auto, you can have a play on the options, but if it ain’t broken, don’t fix it, that’s my motto. So leave that on auto and click OK. And that’s now gonna process those two DNG files into a panoramic. And we’ll come back in a second when it’s finish processing. Okay, so here’s our pano on screen, I’ll just zoom out a bit. Okay, looks a bit donkey been chewing it, but will just soon sort that out. We can just go in and crop down the edges here, like so. And there we go, just still needs a bit more, but you got the idea. Just go in and get that. Okay. So there we go, so let’s have a quick close inspection. It amazes me, see as to Photomerge is okay, it didn’t support the 16 bit which I prefer to work in. But CS3, one of the main things reasons for me that renders the history is that the Photomerge is quite a lot better and it just amazes me, if we just click off this, there, on the layer, you can see the join and it’s just amazing, just an amazing job. The only problems you might get, now again is where you got some movement, actually you can see here in the shots, you got this ghost of people walking across the Charles bridge there, which you could go in and retouch out. Would be a lot of fun, I don’t think, I think I have to retouch some on another shot and it’s a bit fiddly and time consuming. But the only problem you might get on some of these pictures, if you got water in the shot or say a grass on the foreground. I’ve done, I did one a while ago from one of the exhibitions I did last year, and the shot had reeds in the foreground, and the graphic was two different ones, and whether you get reeds moves in between shots in the wind it cause me a few problems so I had to go in there and do that retouching. But on the whole, 99 percent of the time on shots like these, it’s just amazing, really. I don’t know how it does it but it does it and it does it well and it’s certainly beats hand stitching pictures which is a very time consuming and not a lot of fun, to be honest with you. So there we go, I hope you enjoyed that, I hope it some interest, don’t forget to check out the forum prophotoinsights/forum, and also as you mention in the last video, you can now download these videos in high res to keep and I’ll be available on the videos to purchase webpage on this site. Anyway, until next time, cheers, and thanks for watching.
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